In Lorde’s ‘The Louvre’,
there is a soft build-up, where she whispers to her lover than her lover is to
be blamed for the violence that is her heart, that love has led her to. A few
seconds before she offers an image, a fashioning of the violence: the “boom,
boom, boom” of her heart, which she said needs to be broadcasted, danced to,
there is radio silence. The second after she says is, the sonorous silence
repeats itself, enclosing the violence of the booming. There is no music when
she speaks the song of her heart, but the sound is music enough. Two commas. An
ellipsis in the middle. It always surprised me that this song, of all the songs
from Melodrama, does not have a video. Just music.
I imagine what a
video of the song would look like. What a song that demands iconizing,
idealizing, elevating the images of love, begging them to be “hung, down the
back, but who cares, still in the Louvre”; would look like. I think of the
radio silence that encases the desperate thumping of the heart. I think of the
cover of Melodrama, Lorde lying on her bed, a wrist on her pillow, her
hair askew; shaded in blue and yellow; as if she has been drawn into light from
a photograph where light did not exist. The first time I heard ‘The Louvre’, I
lay similarly. It was dark and soft enough that there was nothing except the
song filling up the room. At some point, I felt myself dissolving, disappearing,
broken from the world in the soft cocoon of silence, as my heart thumped fiercely.
Two dark commas. A suspended ellipsis in the middle.
*
The summer before
I turned 20, I met Rishabh for the first time. We sat in the porch, an open
field before us, a hand pump in the corner. It was the first time we would be
bathing in three days. We smelled like sweat and mud and exhaustion, and we had
dreamt of a bucket, some running water. We were supposed to bathe. We didn’t.
We stayed back,
sitting and talking about what has happened to us, what we couldn’t name. It
was close to midnight, and the stars were out. There was no electricity in
Ichadih. If we strayed too far from the building we were staying in, we could
dissolve into the night, shapeless, formless. We listened to music, brief, soft
and slow. A comma above. The ellipsis of our conversation. A comma below.
Before Rishabh finally walked away to the hand pump; he admitted that there
wasn’t too much to live for; “if it weren’t for my parents, I would have ended
it a long time ago”. A comma, Mother-shaped, cocooning. A comma, Father-shaped,
cocooning. An ellipsis, Rishabh-shaped, implying continuity, representing
pause; cocooned.
*
This year, I kept a
music diary of sorts, archiving my year through music. Think bullet journal,
except songs where thoughts should exist, because that felt more authentic than
my own thoughts. I listened to the same song on repeat, until I was no longer
haunted by it. Someone told me when I was 14 that this was how they listened to
music. This revelation was strange, because to point this habit out so specifically
meant that there were other ways of listening; even a normative one, where
a song you loved did not demand utter self-surrender.
In July, I would wake
up in the middle of the night, filled with an ache for Elena Tonra’s voice, my
heart, a rabbit in a rib cage. When she finally sang, “Poke at my iris, why can’t
I cry about this?” it was a drug release, a sedative for a desperate,
frightened thing. In August, I was standing at the kitchen doorway, behind
Hovsep, as he washed the dishes. His back was turned to me, convinced I was
still in the living room. The sunlight streamed in through the window, falling
on his hands and hair, turning him yellow. He sang to himself; an audience of
one. Much later, I would laugh with him, telling him that he had an unplanned
flirty vibe: that without his planning it, everyone fell in love with him, just
a little bit. It had something to do with how he would look at people, how his
gaze stretched people out into more than the moment, adding a little stroke
until a dot turned into a comma.
His singing was low
and powerful, humming emerging from the centre of his rib, filling up his
throat and then the kitchen. The utensils clanged against the sink, but never
so loud as to interrupt the interluding bum-bum-bums he slipped into, as he switched
from one song to the other. The water was running, but never so fast as to
drown out the low pull of each “remember” he sang. The rabbit in the rib cage was
quiet, listening; as I believe all the birds were, the trees visible from his
window were, the bus stop was, the stove was, the unwashed plates were; the
whole, still house was. It was a moment of perfect pause, where there was nothing
but Hovsep and his light, the yellow afternoon light indistinguishable from his
own skin. I stood at the doorway, watching how the music translated from notes
of sound to strokes of light; how each note stretched the dots of an ellipsis
into comma, comma, comma.
*
Two years after Rishabh
admitted how little of a future he saw for himself, he texted me, telling me
there was so much that had changed since when we were together in Jharkhand, last.
That he had fallen in love, something he swore he never would; that he had
fallen out of love; something he swore wouldn’t affect him; that he had seen
the future and loved it; something he swore he was unable to do that night in
Ichadih.
Rishabh and I send
each other music, collapsing into the same excitement for every new season of
Coke Studio Pakistan. We send music when our hearts break, when we do not know
where the words begin and end, or how they even fit, and we hope that simply
listening to how there is pain greater than the pain of heartbreak, how there
is relief greater than the relief of love; will be salve enough. Sometimes the ellipsis
between the pauses of our comma-shaped meetings and re-meetings feel like dots tethering
us.
*
These days, I have
been listening to Taylor Swift’s 22, in which she is laughing about being young
and wild and happy, a spunky song about taking risks, because she has the world
ahead of her. Immediately after, I listen to The Japanese House, where 22-year-old
Amber Bain sings that something has to change, a spunky song about ennui,
because we are living a looped life. I think of Mobius strips, looking like my
favourite number, which promises infinity but loops back to an unspecified
origin.
These days, the
moon has been orange. At night, I turn off the lights and imagine myself dancing
in the future, the moon, a crystal ball; a disco ball; a solitary bulb in a
dark room. I never dance, but I think of dancing so vividly, I may as well be.
I don’t know what a
video of ‘The Louvre’ would look like. But each time, I imagine Lorde dancing,
desperately, to her lover. I imagine me dancing to mine. Two commas, sad,
dancing, suspended; an ellipsis, circular
and buffering on top of our dark video.
